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Masculinity Without Men

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Masculinity Without Men What's the use of being a little boy if you are going to grow up to be a man? -Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography (1937) 1 AN INTRODUCTION TO FEMALE MASCULINITY Masculinity without Men The Real Thing What is "masculinity"? This has been probably the most common ques­ tion that I have faced over the past five years while writing on the topic of female masculinity. If masculinity is not the social and cultural and indeed political expression of maleness, then what is it? I do not claim to have any definitive answer to this question, but I do have a few proposals about why masculinity must not and cannot and should not reduce down to the male body and its effects. I also venture to assert that although we seem to have a difficult time defining masculinity, as a society we have little trouble in recognizing it, and indeed we spend massive amounts of time and money ratifying and supporting the versions of masculinity that we enjoy and trust; many of these "heroic masculinities" depend absolutely on the sub­ ordination of alternative masculinities. I claim in this book that far from being an imitation of maleness, female masculinity actually affords us a glimpse of how masculinity is constructed as masculinity. In other words, female masculinities are framed as the rejected scraps of dominant mas­ culinity in order that male masculinity may appear to be the real thing. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/674300/9781478002703-001.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 2 • An Introduction to Female Masculinity But what we understand as heroic masculinity has been produced by and across both male and female bodies. This opening chapter does not simply offer a conventional theoreti­ cal introduction to the enterprise of conceptualizing masculinity without men; rather, it attempts to compile the myths and fantasies about mas­ culinity that have ensured that masculinity and maleness are profoundly difficult to pry apart. I then offer, by way of a preliminary attempt to re­ imagine masculinity, numerous examples of alternative masculinities in fiction, film, and lived experience. These examples are mostly queer and female, and they show clearly how important it is to recognize alternative masculinities when and where they emerge. Throughout this introduction, I detail the many ways in which female masculinity has been blatantly ignored both in the culture at large and within academic studies of mascu­ linity. This widespread indifference to female masculinity, I suggest, has clearly ideological motivations and has sustained the complex social struc­ tures that wed masculinity to maleness and to power and domination. I firmly believe that a sustained examination of female masculinity can make crucial interventions within gender studies, cultural studies, queer studies, and mainstream discussions of gender in general. Masculinity in this society inevitably conjures up notions of power and legitimacy and privilege; it often symbolically refers to the power of the state and to uneven distributions of wealth. Masculinity seems to extend outward into patriarchy and inward into the family; masculinity repre­ sents the power of inheritance, the consequences of the traffic in women, and the promise of social privilege. But, obviously, many other lines of identification traverse the terrain of masculinity, dividing its power into complicated differentials of class, race, sexuality, and gender. If what we call "dominant masculinity" appears to be a naturalized relation between maleness and power, then it makes little sense to examine men for the con­ tours of that masculinity's social construction. Masculinity, this book will claim, becomes legible as masculinity where and when it leaves the white male middle-class body. Arguments about excessive masculinity tend to focus on black bodies (male and female), latino/a bodies, or working-class bodies, and insufficient masculinity is all too often figured by Asian bodies or upper-class bodies; these stereotypical constructions of variable mascu­ linity mark the process by which masculinity becomes dominant in the sphere of white middle-class maleness. But all too many studies that cur­ rently attempt to account for the power of white masculinity recenter this Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/674300/9781478002703-001.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 An Introduction to Female Masculinity , 3 white male body by concentrating all their analytical efforts on detailing the forms and expressions of white male dominance. Numerous studies of Elvis, white male youth, white male feminism, men and marriage, and domestications of maleness amass information about a subject whom we know intimately and ad nauseam. This study professes a degree of indiffer­ ence to the whiteness of the male and the masculinity of the white male and the project of naming his power: male masculinity figures in my project as a hermeneutic, and as a counterexample to the kinds of masculinity that seem most informative about gender relations and most generative of social change. This book seeks Elvis only in the female Elvis impersonator Elvis Herselvis; it searches for the political contours of masculine privilege not in men but in the lives of aristocratic European cross-dressing women in the 1920s; it describes the details of masculine difference by comparing not men and women but butch lesbians and female-to-male transsexuals; it examines masculinity's iconicity not in the male matinee idol but in a history of butches in cinema; it finds, ultimately, that the shapes and forms of modern masculinity are best showcased within female masculinity. How else to begin a book on female masculinity but by deposing one of the most persistent of male heroes: Bond, James Bond. To illustrate my point that modern masculinity is most easily recognized as female mascu­ linity, consider the James Bond action film, in which male masculinity very often appears as only a shadow of a more powerful and convincing alterna­ tive masculinity. In Goldeneye (1995), for example, Bond battles the usual array of bad guys: Commies, Nazis, mercenaries, and a superaggressive violent femme type. He puts on his usual performance of debonair action adventure hero, and he has his usual supply of gadgetry to aid him - a re­ tractable belt, a bomb disguised as a pen, a laser weapon watch, and so on. But there's something curiously lacking in Goldeneye, namely, credible masculine power. Bond's boss, M, is a noticeably butch older woman who calls Bond a dinosaur and chastises him for being a misogynist and a sex­ ist. His secretary, Miss Moneypenny, accuses him of sexual harassment, his male buddy betrays him and calls him a dupe, and ultimately women seem not to go for his charms-bad suits and lots of sexual innuendo­ which seem as old and as ineffective as his gadgets. Masculinity, in this rather actionless film, is primarily prosthetic and, in this and countless other action films, has little if anything to do with biological maleness and signifies more often as a technical special effect. In Goldeneye it is M who most convincingly performs masculinity, and she Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/674300/9781478002703-001.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 4 • An Introduction to Female Masculinity does so partly by exposing the sham of Bond's own performance. It is M who convinces us that sexism and misogyny are not necessarily part and parcel of masculinity, even though historically it has become difficult, if not impossible, to untangle masculinity from the oppression of women. The action adventure hero should embody an extreme version of norma­ tive masculinity, but instead we find that excessive masculinity turns into a parody or exposure of the norm. Because masculinity tends to manifest as natural gender itself, the action flick, with its emphases on prosthetic extension, actually undermines the heterosexuality of the hero even as it extends his masculinity. So, in Goldeneye, for example, Bond's masculinity is linked not only to a profoundly unnatural form of masculine embodi­ ment but also to gay masculinities. In the scene in which Bond goes to pick up his newest set of gadgets, a campy and almost queeny science nerd gives Bond his brand-new accessories and demonstrates each one with great enthusiasm. It is no accident that the science nerd is called Agent Q. We might read Agent Q as a perfect model of the interpenetration of queer and dominant regimes-Q is precisely an agent, a queer subject who exposes the workings of dominant heterosexual masculinity. The gay mas­ culinity of Agent Q and the female masculinity of M provide a remarkable representation of the absolute dependence of dominant masculinities on minority masculinities. When you take his toys away, Bond has very little propping up his performance of masculinity. Without the slick suit, the half smile, the ciga­ rette lighter that transforms into a laser gun, our James is a hero without the action or the adventure. The masculinity of the white male, what we might call "epic masculinity," depends absolutely, as any Bond flick dem­ onstrates, on a vast subterranean network of secret government groups, well-funded scientists, the army, and an endless supply of both beauti­ ful bad babes and beautiful good babes, and finally it relies heavily on an immediately recognizable "bad guy." The "bad guy" is a standard generic feature of epic masculinity narratives: think only of Paradise Lost and its eschatological separation between God and Devil; Satan, if you like, is the original bad guy. Which is not to say that the bad guy's masculinity bars him from the rewards of male privilege-on the contrary, bad guys may also look like winners, but they just tend to die more quickly.
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